


i'm gonna kill you if you don't beat me to it

by luminoussbeings



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, au where zuko actually loses his eye
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27545644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luminoussbeings/pseuds/luminoussbeings
Summary: For the first time in years, Zuko almost laughs—doesn’t the boy know Zuko could melt his entire home in a matter of minutes? He meets the boy’s eyes, and finds a hardness there that belies his tone. He does know, Zuko realizes. The boy has no illusions about how this altercation will end.But he’s lost enough not to care.or, books 1-3 as a dysfunctional love story
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 47





	i'm gonna kill you if you don't beat me to it

Zuko wakes quickly and without thought, the pain reaching him only shortly after the darkness. He wrenches out of bed, then stumbles in the black—something is wrong. Very wrong. Instantly someone is there, strong arms reaching out to steady him— _Father?_ he thinks, briefly, foolishly, and his heart sinks as he recognizes Uncle’s soothing tones. 

“Back to bed, Prince Zuko,” Uncle is saying, but Zuko won’t budge. His stomach roils; the floor undulates beneath his feet. From somewhere far away, he makes out muffled cursing and the faint smell of salt. 

Boat. He’s on a boat. 

The revelation does little to slow his thumping heart rate. Something is still off, and he shakes away Uncle’s touch. A spot of light flares in the corner of his vision—a torch, hanging from a wall. He steps toward it and nearly retches. He’s in a cabin, that much he’s gathered—but it’s _wrong_ , somehow. The edges stretch and compress like the carnival mirrors he’d visited on Ember Island. The floor promises its location then retreats from his feet with each step. And the pain he’d pushed aside, just as he’s always pushed it aside—it rises at once in a great wave, threatening to knock him to his knees.

When Uncle leads him gently back to the cot, Zuko doesn’t fight. But he ignores the old man’s protests as he reaches up to unwind the bandages wrapped tight around his skull. 

“Nephew, please. You need to rest.”

“No. What I _need_ is to know the truth,” Zuko counters. Uncle sighs heavily, but to Zuko’s surprise, his footsteps retreat until Zuko is sure he’s alone in the cabin.

He takes a shaky breath. The salty air tastes like blood in his mouth. When the last of the bandages come off, he holds a hand to his face, fingers mapping a ruin of whorls and ragged skin. But he keeps going, tracing a path under his left eyebrow until he confirms what he hadn’t wanted to believe.

The eye is gone.

***

Rage is a tool. Zuko knows this, but there’s infinite ways to relearn the lesson. 

He learns it when Uncle, in halting tones, finally explains the terms of his banishment— _capture the Avatar, the fool’s story, the myth that’s been half-forgotten for a hundred years_ —and only by gripping that rage like a lifeline can he stop himself from breaking apart completely. 

He learns it again when he’s practicing his forms on the top deck. _Strike, lunge, kick._ The wind whips his skin raw, snuffing out his flames as quickly as they appear. Sweat trickles down the small of his back; he can feel the crew watching him out of the corners of their eyes. Sizing him up. The idiot kid that got them stuck on this floating iron prison, miles and miles from home.

The sun is bald overhead. Too bright—sickening. Zuko squints his eye and runs the form again.

Strike, lunge—

_Shit_. He crashes flat onto his tailbone, hard. His depth perception’s been returning, slowly—but evidently too slowly. He’s forcing air back into his lungs and sitting up, wincing, when he hears it.

A laugh.

It’s quick—more an involuntary huff than anything loud or protracted, and cuts off abruptly, like the perpetrator realized what they’d done. It doesn’t matter. Zuko’s on his feet in an instant, stalking towards the cluster of crewmembers with a fury too large for his skin.

“Who,” he growls. 

The men glance between each other. They’re unsmiling, but none look particularly concerned—and why should they be? Zuko may have been the crown prince, once, but out here in the sea, amid the salt and storms and iron, he’s nothing more than an inept child. Lame. Deformed. Stumbling over his own feet.

His veins simmer. “Who,” he repeats, the word like gravel in his mouth. 

Some of the men’s faces twitch, fighting smiles. Zuko smiles back, thin and lethal. They still weren’t getting it. 

But they would, soon enough.

One of the men shifts, holding up his hands. “Look, kid—“

Quick as a snake, Zuko grabs the man’s wrist and lets heat flow to his fingers. “Try again,” he says, deadly calm. 

“I—what?” the man gasps, trying to pull away, but Zuko’s stronger than he looks, and his grip doesn’t break. 

“Try. Again.”

The man’s sweating in earnest now, and Zuko can tell that only pride keeps him from yelping in pain. “Spirits, kid, what do you want me to—”

“ _Prince_ ,” Zuko grinds out. He pushes more fire into his grip until the man finally cries aloud. Around them, the other crew members take an uneasy step back. “I am still your prince, and you will address me as such. Or you can take your chances out there.” He jerks his head to the dark expanse of ocean, looks the man dead in the eye, and lets him go.

The man draws his hand to his chest. There’s a circle of singed flesh around his wrist, angry red and curling to black at the edges. The wind shifts and Zuko can _smell_ it—charred skin, like something from the kitchens but far, far worse. His stomach twists and he sees his father looming over him, feels his own skin melting, burning—it takes everything he has not to be sick all over the wooden floor. _What the hell did I just do?_

“Apologies, Prince Zuko,” one of the men says. The others murmur their concurrence, not meeting his eye, and Zuko can tell from their posture that for the first time, they’re afraid. 

Good. 

A trickle of satisfaction cuts through his queasiness, and he latches onto it, drawing it into sharp focus. He likes the way they’re looking at him, he realizes. Like he’s something to be feared. Not pitied, not derided. Feared. 

He thinks of his father’s lessons. _Respect is only earned through pain._ Better to be angry than afraid. Better to be hated than undermined. The man had deserved what Zuko gave him, just as Zuko deserved what his father did to him. 

This was the way of things. 

Zuko nods once. The men take their dismissal without hesitation, and soon he’s alone at the railing. The metal bar is hot enough to scald, but he grips it anyway, staring out at the water until night swallows the sun.

This is the way of things. But somewhere deep inside, a small part of him—a part that had never been scarred, never tortured, never ripped from his home and tossed out to sea—wonders if it has to be.

***

He spends two interminable years chasing legends and ghosts. 

No. Legends at least have substance; a lesson to impart, some great moral rectitude to impress on their listeners. 

All Zuko learns those two years is how hard he can push himself before he snaps completely. 

He doesn’t sleep. He eats only when Uncle can corner him. He trains constantly, ruthlessly, until every muscle aches and the ship is blasted with soot. 

It’s not enough. 

He learns to man the ship like it’s an extension of his own arm. The dark, choppy sea is at once companion and enemy; captor and source of hope. One day—today, tomorrow—the seas will part and divulge the Avatar, cowardly and weak, and Zuko will loop his neck in heavy iron chains and drag him aboard the ship. But he won’t celebrate, not until he brings the Avatar back to the Firelord and lets his head roll to the base of the throne.

Only then will he let himself smile.

He clings to that image like a tether, a lifeline anchored in cold fury. Without it—without the unshakable conviction that he _will_ kill the Avatar, that he _will_ make it home—the delicate ecosystem of his sanity would collapse.

So he holds the rage tight enough to blot out the entire world.

He investigates every cave, every swamp, every mountain and every watershed. He spends hours poring over maps, decoding ancient scrolls, and tracking down the elders of any squalid village they pass by. He bleeds and aches and screams.

He finds nothing.

Slowly, he begins to unravel.

***

When the signal blasts open the Southern sky, Zuko freezes. He’s had false alarms before. Chased down countless leads that left him nothing but battered and cold and empty handed. But this—

The beam of light pulses toward the stars, and Zuko can feel every surge of blood from his heart. 

This is different.

He’s barking orders in an instant, and the ship comes to life around him, a flurry of movement as they swing towards the signal. 

Someone cuts through the melee of activity to stand by his side. Uncle. “Be careful,” he murmurs, a cautionary hand grazing Zuko’s elbow.

Zuko shrugs it off. “No. He’s out there, this time. I can feel it.” And he can—deep in the walls of his chest, drumming a low beat of _it’s time, it’s time, it’s time._ “And he’s _mine_.”

When Uncle speaks, it‘s almost too quiet to be heard. “That’s what I’m afraid of, my nephew.”

***

He knocks aside the water tribe boy with ease. Zuko’s eye darts wildly, waiting for another attack—a legion of soldiers, a powerful, wizened Avatar—but none comes.

“Give me the Avatar,” he calls. “I _know_ you’re hiding him. Give him up, or your village will drown.” As if to back up his words, the warship pulses behind him, threading cracks through the ice at their feet. 

The children blink at him. The village is as still as a grave. He catches a flash of movement, and readies for attack—but it’s just a ragdoll, slipping to the ice out of a child’s hands.

Zuko feels unsteady. This—this isn’t what he’d been expecting.

A yell pierces through the frozen air. Zuko turns, incredulous—it’s the boy again, blazing toward him with a bucket’s worth of fury and not an inch of finesse. Zuko knocks him down in three moves. The ice hisses as the boy scrapes across it, but his eyes are undimmed, trained on Zuko with a brightness as cold as the moon. He’s spirited, Zuko has to give him that—but if he’s learned anything from the past two years, it’s that spirit never equals victory.

“Enough games,” Zuko says, and strides forward to seize the village elder. The old woman doesn’t cry out as he grabs her, but the shakiness of her breathing betrays her fear. “Give him to—”

Something slams into the back of his head. Hard. Spots cloud his vision, and he stumbles forward, releasing the woman as he fights to keep from toppling to the ice. _What in the hells—?_

When he looks up, the water tribe boy is on his feet, clutching a boomerang with an insane grin. “And there’s more where that came from,” he says with a faintly ridiculous amount of self-satisfaction. 

For the first time in years, Zuko almost laughs—doesn’t the boy know Zuko could melt his entire home in a matter of minutes? He meets the boy’s eyes, and finds a hardness there that belies his tone. He does know, Zuko realizes. The boy has no illusions about how this altercation will end.

But he’s lost enough not to care. 

It’s a feeling Zuko knows all too well. In another life, he might even sympathize. 

But this life holds no room for pity.

Zuko draws back, feeling the heat flicker through his veins, and prepares himself to bend. He’s seconds from turning the village to slush when a small voice cuts through the wind.

“Stop. It’s me you want, not them.”

Everything in Zuko’s body stills. Two years of training, two years of fury and torment—all for this moment.

He turns and lays eyes on the Avatar. 

***

The Avatar is in his grasp. On Zuko’s ship, bound with rope, downcast eyes drooping to the deck.

It’s not quite how he’d pictured it—his image of an arrogant old warrior, smug and drunken with power, vanishes into smoke as he watches the boy’s stooped frame. Something about it makes him feel oddly unmoored. Unbidden, the image of the child’s doll, slipping out of trembling hands to the ice below, rises in his mind. For the briefest of moments, he’d had the strange urge to pick it up.

One of his guards barks an order, loud and curt. Zuko snaps his attention back to the ship. Reaching in, he finds the familiar thread of anger, lets it anchor him back to his mission. The Avatar’s head at his father’s feet. He won’t rest until that’s done.

But despite all his promises to himself, Zuko can’t bite back the rush of excitement. When he looks at his quarry, he doesn’t see the scrawny, bald-headed kid shivering in his loose robes—he sees home. 

Home. The white sand beaches he’d played on as a child. The dusky smoke of the kitchens; the cooks who’d slip him extra firecakes when he snuck down after dinner. His sister’s laugh, caught in a rare good mood, the two of them sliding down a hallway in slippered feet. _Home_ —and then the dam is bursting, every honeyed memory he’s forbidden himself from dwelling on rising to the surface and suffusing his tongue with a forgotten sweetness.

Home. He’s going home.

When the Avatar escapes an hour later, Zuko doesn’t cry out. He doesn’t rage, doesn’t make a scene in front of the guards, doesn’t send any of them to the brig for failing to secure the prisoner. Instead, he walks calmly to his chamber, closes the door, and empties his pocket. 

The water tribe doll rests in his palm. Its bedraggled limbs flop over his fingers, stitches fraying. One of its button eyes is nearly detached. 

He doesn’t know what had made him save it. 

His fist closes over the doll. Despite everything he’d learned, he’d let the Avatar fool him. Let himself underestimate his prey, let himself ride on the coattails of an easy victory instead of ensuring every possible defense. Let himself indulge in memory. In hope.

A burst of white-hot flames consumes the doll. When it chars to nothing but ash in his hands, he tosses what’s left to the ground and wipes his fingers on his armor, leaving inky black smudges across his breastplate. 

Sentimentality had cost him this round.

He would not make the same mistake again. 

**Author's Note:**

> this has been sitting in my drafts since august and maybe throwing it into the void will remind me that hey, writing is a thing, you should do that more often? there's more to life than suffering thru college????
> 
> anyway thank you for reading ily


End file.
